Two Poems

the stars are unfamiliar here
the paved way home is not intact
it inches this way and that way
in the hopes of finding me lost,
how silly because I have been
lost for a long time and no road can
change that.

how odd to think I once drank
of my mother’s breast
a few inches a few inches
of pure hope that only
infants are capable of rustling.

how strange to think that the
dead-end I grew up on
still exists in another hemisphere
yet the miniature of who I am,
yet with a larger heart
a larger spark,
exists only in a memory.

I have been led to believe that
life is a mere progression,
time is a line with an end
and a beginning yet
when I think of how alive
I feel now
and how alive I felt then,
how surreal.

maybe we are all under the guise
that life exists in these lines
and on paper
in order to make sense
of when
the sun rising in the window
only blinds us
and we beg for when we began.

but what is to begin if not to end
and what is to struggle if not
to eventually give in or to
give way
to what has been heavy.

the times and spaces that exist
only in the times and spaces
they exist, rush in and out
as if to exist is to advance
and leave again
they are only real inside my head.

I am only real in these times and
spaces
never long never
much but so much all the same,
bright colors flashing smiling faces
and beating breathing
I wish that I could return
I wish that I had never left,
a child suckling at a mother’s breast
it all exists inside my

for emily who shakes mountains

there are pictures of you in my head
pictures of you smoking a cigarette standing next
to the Seine
and the bright of the city falls on your cheek,
you look beautiful.
a new fallen snow in the mountains of Colorado
where you laugh and drink hot chocolate
and you are happy,
no need for metaphors
you are just happy and I am there happy with you.
I picture you next to the dirt river, all dried up,
that I grew up in and you bring life to it,
the fish return to the blue and the dirt falls deep
to the bottom
and no one pollutes it for corporate gain,
they wouldn’t dare
because they would be polluting you and you are
pure and good and to pollute pure and good things
you would need to have a dead heart.
these pictures of you in my head always have you smiling
your teeth are straight and white and biting
at the rough of life that keeps trying to knock you
to topple you
like the tower of babel but we are from two nations
separated by a common language but you must surely understand
“I love you”
your rough and your hard do not frighten me,
I will hold you until you are no longer shaking or until I am shaking with you
this whole continent can shake with us
until we are a tumor bubbling in the sea.